Hands

When Ellie was nine and living in Boston's FEDRA run orphanage, Ralphie Tyler stole an entire stack of The National Geographic from under her bed and laughed while he ripped out the pages. The bright shreds of paper scattered over the ground like tears or fallen leaves or the blood from his nose when she punched him in his stupid face.

The sun was setting on the next day before anyone with any authority noticed Ellie's hand had swollen up like an ugly black gourd and even though she refused to tell them what she'd done to it they sent her to the infirmary where a skinny old man with crooked glasses and super straight teeth put her hand under something he called an 'X-ray machine' which was cool - like that hero in her treasured comics but for real - and she stared in wonder as it clunked and rattled really loudly and after what felt like forever Doctor Teeth came back with a black and white picture of, of...was that her hand? On the inside?

The bones were so delicate, thinner than they looked pressing up from the inside of her skin and how was it that they were just now breaking? Surely just the act of holding a pencil or another hand would crack them. She was too busy boggling to listen to Doctor Teeth as he explained which bone was broken and how but she could see it. It wasn't all the way through, a tiny stretch of bone reaching desperately across the fracture, clinging to wholeness. That's what she really remembers - that tiny bit holding tight to the rest, fighting separation with everything it had.

Joel's hand is fucking massive. Cradled as it is between two of hers, it would be nothing for him to twist it around and engulf both of Ellie's hands in just the one of his, slim white fingers poking out in the gaps between calluses and scarred, tan skin. When his hands are relaxed the knuckles barely protrude from beneath his thickened skin, unlike her own which always look ready to rip their way free. But the skin under her fingertips is split wide open. He's beaten a man to death, bare-fisted and furious; flesh tearing on sharp cheekbones and broken teeth, bursting open like a fat, rotten fruit. The wounds are gaping and bloody and raw and the knuckle at the base of his middle finger glistens wet and exposed in a particularly wide gash.

She doesn't call him an idiot. She doesn't point out that she told him so, told him to take a fucking second to pick up a damn pipe or something before you fucking bludgeon someone to death. She'd seen the wild look in the other man's eyes, seen his dirty, grasping fingers. She'd felt them around her throat. And then Joel had killed him. Hit him and hit him and hit him. The man had put his hands on Ellie, and Joel had used his own to kill him.

It's Joel's idea of a fair trade.

So instead of saying anything she pours the last of the Wild Turkey over his brutalized knuckles and wraps them tight with a torn-off strip of striped blue cloth. And when she's sure she's done all she can there she moves her own fingertips down the long bones at the back of his hand, checking for breaks. The skin there is a patchwork of scars: a small round pucker dead center that she recognizes as a cigarette burn, several white lines of varying lengths and thicknesses. There's a fat blue vein sitting there, under the scars but over the bones, and on top of it all is a dusting of coarse, dark hair. The bones are miraculously whole. They're thick and sturdy, terminating in heavy, round knuckles and blunted fingertips.

'Survivor's hands,' she'd thought, the first time she'd done this for him. Just after Pittsburgh, but just before Sam and Henry. She knows better now. She's seen survivor's hands. She's been beaten by them and she's bitten them, tasted the salt and poison of their skin. She's felt them on her face and in her hair. She's been pinned by them and -

And Joel's hands are fighter's hands.

It was with survivor's hands that he'd built a life and laid it to rest, that he'd constructed homes and torn them down, that he'd patched wounds and beaten his brother and killed innocent people. But fighter's hands had brushed her arm - 'Still here' - and cradled her head - 'I'll always be here for you, understand?' - and carried her from her death on a cold hospital slab - 'I gotcha. We're okay.'

Fighter's hands will protect her, support her, carry her if she needs it. Joel has fought everyone and everything -both her and himself- to keep her, to stay with her, to save her. He will never falter or hesitate, will follow her wherever she leads him: Heaven or hell, it won't matter to Joel and the weight of that, the weight of his life, sits heavier on her thin shoulders than the cure and all the lives depending on it ever had.

Her hands shake a little as she turns his over to reveal his palm, bisected by her striped makeshift bandage and a fat, raised scar. He'd gripped something with enough force to drive it almost entirely through his hand. Ellie slides her fingers over the blistered line and wonders if the mark has been emblazoned into the trunks of his bones.

She imagines she's been engraved into his bones, he holds onto her so desperately.

The calluses on his fingers and the heel of his hand are thick as a second skin. She presses her nail into that last one, hard, but Joel doesn't even flinch. There's one on the outside of his thumb, from gripping a gun, she notes, and brushes the soft pad of her own thumb over it, lining up a matching callus on her own hand. Fighter's hands.

She holds onto him just as tightly.

"Ellie." His voice is low and rough and she lifts her eyes from his hand in hers and meets his gaze and he looks tired, and worried, and gentle in a way she knows is just for her. Warmth wells up in her in response, turns into a sharp ache in her chest that robs her of words or maybe even breath. This beautiful man, he'd once survived for himself but now he fights for her.

She twines their hands, her fingers settling gently between gashed knuckles, her palm pressing firmly against his own.

She imagines he's been engraved into her bones. 'I'm not letting you go.'

"Fighter's hands," she tells him.